Story on electronic waste wins acclaim

Kudos and congrats to Phoenix contributor Tim Lehnert, whose November 2006 story, Your desktop could be a time bomb, about the consequences of computer waste, won a first-place prize in environmental reporting this weekened from the New England Press Association.

Since computers are obviously still with us, the story remains a good read:

On the consumer end, disposing of electronic waste is an immense problem. Every year, 100 million computers, monitors, and TVs become obsolete in the US, and this number is growing. Although a lot of this gear winds up in landfills (the US Environmental Protection Agency calls e-waste the leading contributor of lead to municipal waste), most of it is sent to Asia and Africa, effectively transferring the problem to poorer countries.

There’s just a small amount of harmful material — like lead — in each discarded computer, and because the e-waste problem is relatively new, there’s little evidence specifically linking computer waste, with, for example, kidney damage, mental retardation, or other conditions associated with lead poisoning. Yet environmentalists like Sheila Dormody, head of the Rhode Island office of Clean Water Action, still worry, both about the sheer volume of discarded electronics, as well as the long-term threat that they could pose.

Such concerns are on target. Lead and mercury don’t just go away, after all. They accumulate, and can enter the food stream through the ground and the water, creating a chain of toxicity, and a difficult and costly, if not impossible, cleanup.

And besides lead, other marchers in Rhode Island’s parade of electronic toxins include thousands of pounds of mercury (which can cause brain and kidney damage, particularly in babies and children); chromium (which can cause asthmatic bronchitis and damage the DNA); and cadmium (which can cause kidney damage and harm bones). Hundreds of thousands of pounds of brominated flame retardants, which are used in computers and in TVs — and which have been linked to fetal damage — have also wound up in Rhode Island’s trash.